ds, idyls and romances in
their minds, builded them an empire crying glory in the mud.

From New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine had come a strange
company, earnest, patient, determined, unschooled in even the primer of
refinement, hungry for something the significance of which, when they
had it, they could not even guess, anxious to be called great,
determined so to be without ever knowing how. Here came the dreamy
gentleman of the South, robbed of his patrimony; the hopeful student of
Yale and Harvard and Princeton; the enfranchised miner of California
and the Rockies, his bags of gold and silver in his hands. Here was
already the bewildered foreigner, an alien speech confounding him--the
Hun, the Pole, the Swede, the German, the Russian--seeking his homely
colonies, fearing his neighbor of another race.

Here was the negro, the prostitute, the blackleg, the gambler, the
romantic adventurer par excellence. A city with but a handful of the
native-born; a city packed to the doors with all the riffraff of a
thousand towns. Flaring were the lights of the bagnio; tinkling the
banjos, zithers, mandolins of the so-called gin-mill; all the dreams
and the brutality of the day seemed gathered to rejoice (and rejoice
they did) in this new-found wonder of a metropolitan life in the West.

The first prominent Chicagoan whom Cowperwood sought out was the
president of the Lake City National Bank, the largest financial
organization in the city, with deposits of over fourteen million
dollars. It was located in Dearborn Street, at Munroe, but a block or
two from his hotel.

"Find out who that man is," ordered Mr. Judah Addison, the president of
the bank, on seeing him enter the president's private waiting-room.

Mr. Addison's office was so arranged with glass windows that he could,
by craning his neck, see all who entered his reception-room before they
saw him, and he had been struck by Cowperwood's face and force. Long
familiarity with the banking world and with great affairs generally had
given a rich finish to the ease and force which the latter naturally
possessed. He looked strangely replete for a man of thirty-six--suave,
steady, incisive, with eyes as fine as those of a Newfoundland or a
Collie and as innocent and winsome. They were wonderful eyes, soft and
spring-like at times, glowing with a rich, human understanding which on
the instant could harden and flash lightning. Deceptive eyes,
unreadable, but alluri